IRVINE, Calif. — March 26, 2015 — Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today released Pillars of Eternity, the role-playing game (RPG) that was funded by over 70 thousand backers more than two years ago. Pillars of Eternity, created in the spirit of the classic Infinity Engine titles like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, and crafted by Obsidian with careful attention to fan and backer feedback, is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux PC. Fans who backed Pillars of Eternity will receive it today, while new players everywhere can purchase and play it at pillarsofeternity.com.

To celebrate the launch, Obsidian and Paradox have also released a new trailer, welcoming the world to the realm of Eora:

Second Part of ‘Road to Eternity’ Reveals Pressures of Success after Kickstarter Ends

IRVINE, Calif. — March 23, 2015 —Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today released the second part of “Road to Eternity,” a behind-the-scenes documentary that follows the creation of Pillars of Eternity, the fan-funded role-playing game (RPG) for Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. Pillars of Eternity, which releases worldwide this Thursday, March 26, 2015, was funded over two years ago by more than 70 thousand backers, a process that is shown in this new chapter of the documentary. This portion reveals the sentiment and mindset at Obsidian as the weight of keeping their studio open was lifted – and immediately replaced by the pressure to live up to their backers’ expectations.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th development diary. I’m Johan, and I got dragged into this devdiary writing thingie today because of a curse.. We have lost a few members of the team to the dreaded “holiday”-curse, including podcat & doomdark, but we hope to have them back in a wee while. In the last few months, we’ve spent quite a lot of time going through features, and redesigning those that did not improve the game significantly enough from the previous iterations of the series.

One of those features that went the way of the dodo was the goals system. The goals system did not have a visible progression, it did not have clear instructions to the player, and was constantly mixing between things happening because you selected a goal, or things you had to do to fulfill the goal. This was not acceptable for a feature in a modern PDS game, so we soaked our brains in the nectar of the gods for a while, and came up with a new system, which according to our QA team, “Is very very fun”, and also creates replayability.

Now its time for us, without further ado, to introduce the National Focus system.
...

Final Chance to Pre-Order Obsidian's Forthcoming Epic before March 26 Release

IRVINE, CA — March 17, 2015 — Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today announced that Pillars of Eternity, the fan-funded modern take on a classic role-playing game (RPG) set in an original world created by some of the best minds in RPG development, has reached “Gold Master” (GM) status, and is now ready for its release on March 26, 2015. Pillars of Eternity, originally called “Project Eternity” the 10th most funded Kickstarter ever and second most funded video game , has been in development for two and a half years, and is now ready to complete its journey, arriving on Windows, Mac, and Linux PC next week. The game will release globally, with backers receiving their digital copies as well.

“Seeing Pillars of Eternity through has been an incredible journey for all of us at a deeply personal level,” said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment. “When we took our idea to Kickstarter, our fans got behind us more than we ever thought. It’s been a blast to match their enthusiasm, see them cheer us on, and have them help to keep us on course every step of the way. It's crazy to think that more than two years have come and gone, but time flies that way when you are creating something as important as Pillars of Eternity has become to us.”
...

Cities: Skylines sells more within 24 hours than any previous game in the Paradox catalogue!

STOCKHOLM – March 12, 2015 – Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order, currently gaming’s proudest parents, have today revealed that Cities: Skylines, the critically and commercially acclaimed city simulation game for PC,
Mac and Linux, has sold an incredible 250,000 copies, including pre-orders, in its first 24 hours on sale, shattering sales records for every previous game in the Paradox catalogue released within the same period of time.

Commenting on the success of Cities: Skylines, CEO of Paradox Interactive Fredrik Wester said, “We would like to offer our deepest and heartfelt thanks to the community for their passionate support and to let them know that we
are committed to supporting this wonderful game for years to come, in the same way that we have for our Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis communities. We knew that we had a great game on our hands and so to be able
to continue to provide fans of the game with a multitude of new content for it going forward is fantastic.”
...

EDIT: Updated hotfix to 1.11.2 with a couple more fixes:
- Fixed revolutionary tricolors being all-white
- Splitting off a siege stack no longer puts general in the wrong stack
- Another fix to try and force clients who could not see Women in History to download the files
...

The future is upon us! Through out the years vBulletin has served us well! Time has come for change however, and in two weeks we will be moving over to be using Xenforo instead. We've planned for about a week where the forum will be running on less than optimal grounds due to us having to tweak things, correct bugs etc. We ask for your patience and understanding during this time! We plan for this to happen the week between the 16th and 20th of March 2015!

The new forum will come with a bunch of new features (of which we may remove/disable any at any time should they prove to not work out well) such as:- Developer post filtering (you can filter a thread to only show the developer posts in there)
- Post and thread tagging/rating to help you find what you seek faster!
- Improved account handling. We will move over to be using only Paradox Accounts which will make things run a lot smoother as today's double account system is cause for much dismay and confusion (Don't worry! You will appear exactly like you did on these forums still. Same display name, post count, registration date etc)
- Much improved mobile compatibility
...and more!
...

STOCKHOLM – The pages of history books are filled with the stories of great men – but also great women: artists, authors, councilors, and rulers. WouldTenochtitlan have fallen without the language skills of Malinche guiding Cortez? Had the reign of Edward IV not been cut short by illness, wouldEngland have still ruled the seas, deprived of the strong hand of Elizabeth I?

To mark International Women’s Day (March 8th) Paradox Development Studio has created a free update for Europa Universalis IV, adding 100 great women of history to the game. Each character can be generated through event triggers (a weak regency, a colonial empire, certain ideas, etc.). Players will then have choices about how to use this talented woman. Some may join your court as advisors, some might be suitable for riskier employment as rulers or leaders.
...

Final Developer Diary Video Delves Into the Innovative Systems That Will Help Make Your City the Best it Can Be

STOCKHOLM – March 5, 2015 – Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order, rumored to be secretly constructing the eighth wonder of the world, have today released the final installment of their video developer diary series for Cities: Skylines, the highly anticipated city simulation game for PC, Mac and Linux set to break ground on March 10th!

Lifting the lid on a variety of clever systems within the game to make your job of building your perfect working metropolis as streamlined as possible, the brand new video diary highlights that Cities: Skylines isn’t just a looker but has smarts too!

SAN FRANCISCO— March 4, 2015 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher of games and a singer/songwriter of ice and fire, today published a completely fair-use trailer for Magicka 2, the forthcoming magick-mixing game for PC and the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system. The trailer, containing all-new gameplay and allegedly new ideas, celebrates the upcoming launch of Magicka 2, which will arrive on PC and PS4® on May 26, 2015. The game can be pre-ordered on PC beginning today, with PS4 pre-orders starting soon, according to the alarm Paradox has set on its Night Watch. Magicka 2 will be available for $14.99 on both platforms.
...

World Randomly Encounters Exciting New Sequel to Classic Old-school Title

STOCKHOLM — March 2, 2015 — Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer with plenty of initiative, today announced the forthcoming release of Knights of Pen & Paper 2, coming to PC, iOS, and Android devices. Knights of Pen & Paper 2, the appropriately named sequel to Knights of Pen & Paper +1 Edition, will bring players back to the table, where they can sit and simulate another, different table inside the game (which is about a game). Danger, intrigue, death, role-playing, and roll-playing will return when Knights of Pen & Paper 2 arrives on May 14th.

STOCKHOLM – February 26, 2015 – After a long voyage through rough seas (game development is hard), the newest expansion for Paradox Development Studio’s hit empire-building game Europa Universalis IV has arrived! El Dorado lands with a nearly infinite array of new possibilities and alternate histories, and explorers can begin their voyage into uncharted territories today on PC, Mac and Linux for $14.99.

With the release of Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado only days away, lead designer Martin Anward has moved to the front of the camera to describe the many changes coming in the latest expansion to Paradox Development Studio’s hit historical empire-building game.
...

Brand New Developer Diary Video Illustrates the Artistic Freedom and Creativity Available to Players via Cities: Skylines Modding Tools
STOCKHOLM – February 25, 2015 – Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order, visionary builders of digital gaming skyscrapers, have today released their latest video developer diary for Cities: Skylines, the city simulation game for PC, Mac and Linux releasing on March 10th.
Exploring the rich variety of modding tools available within Cities: Skylines, the video illustrates that you will be free to create your own individual vision of your perfect city, bringing your own ideas into the game and ultimately blurring the line between playing and creating.
To explore all the rich modding options within Cities; Skylines, watch the brand new video developer diary here:
...

Redeeming the Third Reich (or not) in Hearts of Iron 4/IGN
”Even having only played for a couple hours, Hearts of Iron 4 is already one of those games I think about in my spare moments. Modern warfare on this scale has never been so finely modeled while still being relatively accessible and logistically forgiving.http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/...arts-of-iron-4

Hearts of Iron 4 is shaping up to make "The Good War" a great one/PCGamesN
”...it was a tremendous first act, and, considering I was managing one of the largest economies and complex war machines in the 20th century, a surprisingly elegant and intuitive experience. Hearts of Iron 4 did a great job of making sure I knew what I could do and why I might want to do it, so that I was always free to focus on figuring out exactly what I should do. And that’s exactly what a game like this is all about.http://www.pcgamesn.com/hearts-of-ir...war-made-great

Hands On: Hearts Of Iron IV - The best laid plans/Rock Paper Shotgun
"In less than an hour, I prevented World War II by screwing up the invasion of Poland so efficiently that the French army had marched into Berlin by 1938. I’d been following scripted historical goals – y’know, remilitarising the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the kind of to-do list that caused me to wince everytime I glanced at it – but had jumped the gun somewhat, declaring war before my troops were fully prepared. In the final moments, the French invasion on the Western Front was pushing my troops back faster than I could push into the East."http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015...ts-of-iron-iv/

Hi everyone, time for a smoking fresh diary! This time I am going to go through some of the things we showed in the PdxCon stream in more detail.

One of our important design goals for HOI4 is to make you feel like you are growing and nurturing your army as well as putting more focus into pre-war production. We have showed how its important to build up stockpiles of equipment for your army prior to war and get efficiency up for your production lines and we have talked about how you need to gain and spend experience to modify your divisional templates for the army. So whats left? The soft part of the division - the guys who actually does the fighting in the divisions! We wanted you to be able to affect them more as well, and have the effects be more visible.

Conscription and manpower

Manpower will see some big changes in HOI4. Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count. Conscription laws also come with trade-offs in that recruiting more will impact efficiency of your industry and as you dig deeper and starts scraping the barrel of recruits their quality will drop requiring more training time to reach the same level of proficiency. The idea is to make it less clear cut than in hoi3 where more men was always best at all times.
...

Welcome to the fifth and last development diary for Europa Universalis 4: El Dorado. Today we’ll be talking about the gold and silver mines of the new world and how to best secure that wealth for your colonial empire.

Treasure Fleets
It’s no secret that the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Central and South America was primarily driven by a desire for gold and silver. The Spanish crown had sole rights to mine these precious metals in their colonies, which were then loaded onto well-guarded ships and sent back to Spain. Unsurprisingly, this floating wealth drew the attention of pirates and privateers, leading to the Golden Age of Piracy and the Pirates of the Caribbean that we all know and love.

In the El Dorado expansion, we represent this through a mechanic we call ‘Treasure Fleets’. For those that have the expansion, Colonial Nations with gold provinces will no longer gain the income of that gold for themselves, but instead will store it in a ‘Treasure Fleet Counter’ that counts up towards a certain sum depending on the size of the colony’s gold mines. Once the counter is full (usually about twice a year), the colony will send a Treasure Fleet. The Treasure Fleet travels downstream along the trade routes, passing each node between the Colonial Nation and its mother nation’s trade capital. If there are privateers present in these nodes, they will steal a share of the gold relative to their power in the node - so if privateers hold 50% of the power in the Caribbean, they will take half the value out of any treasure fleet that passes through there. At the end of the journey, any money that remains is given to the mother nation, who suffer some inflation depending on the amount of money relative to the size of their economy.
...